Nan Goldin: The Other Side

Description

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin's seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993. There will be a revised introduction by Goldin, and for the first time the voices of those whose stories are represented. Now being released at a time when the discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility. The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early eighties, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the nineties, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin and Bangkok, photographing their public personas while showing their real lives backstage. Goldin's newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she's loved, many of whom she's lost, over the last four decades. The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria... - Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is one of the most eminent photographers of our times, and today lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and those around her. In 1972 she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston, starting her lifelong passion for photographing her queer and transsexual communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the nineties Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2000 she again moved to Paris, where she was invited to create site-specific works at the Louvre and now Versailles. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group fighting the pharmaceutical companies and advocating for addiction treatment in the mounting opioid crisis. The book has been an important medium for Goldin over the decades; her publications with Steidl include The Beautiful Smile (2008) and Diving for Pearls (2016).

Offering an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin's superb work on the topic of gender and sexual orientation...it is well worth a read, particularly at a time when gender and transgender discourse is so pertinent.--Charlotte Stace "Daily Art Magazine" ...gives us a glimpse of that vanished, charming, risky scene.--David O'Neill "Bookforum" [A] groundbreaking book of photographs, documenting drag culture between Boston and New York, Berlin and Bangkok...[it's] somewhere between a written testament, a memorial, a celebration and visual diary of her life.--Finn Blythe "Hero" [Goldin's] pictures came out of the underground world they inhabited, partying, dressing up, posing, kissing, weeping, making love. Drink and drugs were familiar protagonists and there were few gender distinctions. She chronicled her own relationships in the same relentless way.--Liz Jobey "Financial Times" A tribute to trans beauty and gender fluidity...--Ashley Simpson "W Magazine" Goldin captures the glamour and the glory of her friends lives, revealing the passion and power it takes to become who one truly is in the world. In looking at these photographs, it's easy to feel Goldin's devotion and love, her inability to see them as other s reminder how powerful photography truly is.--Sara Rosen "Feature Shoot" Goldin has lived among the drag community since the 1970s. Her book, The Other Side, is a testament to their glamour and defiance.--Emily Dinsdale "Dazed" In 1993, the year after AIDS became the number one cause of death in the US for men ages twenty-five to forty-four, Nan Goldin published The Other Side, a photo book devoted to her friends "expressing gender euphoria."--David Velasco "Artforum" Just as Goldin's best works derive their power from how intimately she has always connected art and her own life, her activism has been prompted by her own experience. Taken together, the nature of her art and the facts of her biography have had the remarkable ability to amplify the voices of those who don't have work in the permanent collections of the world's leading museums.--Fatema Ahmed "Apollo" Nan has saved lives with her work, both in terms of preserving the lives she has encountered and then literally with her activism and interventions in the opioid crisis. She's just this unbelievable figure to me, somebody who is a life-giving force. And this book is something that actually manages to encapsulate that.--Hillary Reid "New York Magazine: Strategist" Nan Goldin's book of photos (which chronicles the lives of her drag-queen and transgender friends in the '70s, '80s, and '90s) goes even further into the other side by including the voices of her subjects amid her snapshots of them.-- "New York Magazine" Steidl presents an expanded edition of Nan Goldin's seminal publication The Other Side. The book is a love letter to the various drag queens and transgendered folk Goldin has encountered throughout the years, capturing their likeness in an intimate and loving manner.--David Saric "S Magazine" The expanded and updated version of The Other Side...comes at a time when increasing attention is deservedly focused on the representation and inclusion of alternative gender identities.--Mark Westall "FAD" The photos are intimate, as one familiar with Goldin would expect; her subjects are bathed in that signature Goldin's golden glow...They are different but not when Goldin catches them off-guard, in the moments of contemplation or applying make up. They are themselves.--Eugene Rabkin "StyleZeitgeist" The Other Side chronicles Goldin's years of living with a group of drag queens in Boston in the 70s and New York in the 80s, as well as her 90s exploration of drag scenes across the globe. This new edition features portraits taken in the years since 1993 and a new introduction from Goldin, who in recent years has also become an activist.--Belle Hutton "AnOther" There is a haunting element to these photos: The people they depict are playing with and claiming their identity in societies that often ostracized them, and, sometimes even denied them humanity. Still, as Goldin writes in the forward: "This book is about beauty. And about a love for my friends."--Samantha Andriano "T Magazine"